Era of Diminishing Returns
On a bewildering and ultimately tedious new album, Taylor Swift resorts to familiar sounds and familiar grievances.
Taylor Swift - The Tortured Poets Department
Taylor Swift has spent the last two years traveling the world on her blockbuster Eras Tour— a stadium-swelling event designed to highlight the evolutionary scope of her recorded output, devoting stage time to each “era” of her creative life. Like Pablo Picasso and Miles Davis, Swift has a history of moving from disruption to disruption, challenging her listeners with new styles and aesthetic interests. She is not the first pop musician to develop an expansive oeuvre that can be taxonomized into discreet phases and movements— you could make the same claim for David Bowie and The Beatles, Bruce Springsteen and Tom Waits— but it’s no small thing that Swift, the most significant pop star of her generation, is in the enviable position of touring a veteran’s body of work while still in her thirtysomething physical prime.
While the Eras Tour unfolded, Swift also made a decided shift into a more-is-more approach to pop imperialism. Between her re-recording projects, the release of previously-unheard “vault” material, multiple bonus track iterations of her Midnights album, and the Eras concert documentary (available in two versions), Swift has put out endless hours of new material in a short span of time— close to 200 new songs since the COVID pandemic. She has gambled on her fans receiving this abundance in a spirit of generosity, not overexposure, and thus far the gamble seems to have paid off.
Both of these trends refract, unfavorably, through the prism of The Tortured Poets Department, which is technically Swift’s eleventh album but is really something like her 30th project overall. Taken in light of the Eras Tour’s creative ambition, Tortured Poets can’t help but feel stagnant. Gone is Swift’s discoverer’s zeal, as she relies not only on the same mid-tempo synth arrangements that characterized Midnights, but also melodies and lyrical conceits that bear striking resemblance to her past work. The album feels not like the start of a new era, but like a dour amalgam of previous ones, returning again and again to the same narrow range of production choices that have characterized her last few records.
There is also the matter of Swift’s astonishing productivity. Lamentably, she is releasing her most tedious music yet at the exact moment when she is most committed to giving us as much of it as possible. Within hours of the album’s release Swift made the mirthless announcement of an entire second act, Tortured Poets instantly ballooning into a two-hour “anthology” of songs that mostly share the same color palette and occupy similar emotional terrain.
Swift made the album primarily with producer Jack Antonoff, her go-to collaborator since 1989, with some pinch-hitting from The National’s Aaron Dessner, who made it into Swift’s orbit for the folklore sessions. The fruitfulness of both collaborations has withered. Between Antonoff’s gleaming, monochromatic synths and Dessner’s all-too-tasteful layering of strings and electronics, Tortured Poets feels oppressively drab— like the photo negative of Lover’s brightly-hued romance and whimsy. For the most part, the album is a moody slog, only occasionally recalling the playfulness or catharsis of Swift’s best work—particularly in the widescreen melodrama of “But Daddy I Love Him,” the elastic pop “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,” the welcome big-beat rush of “I Can Do it With a Broken Heart.”
As for Swift, her maximalist approach now extends not just to her release strategy but to the songs themselves. She has taken notes from her friend and collaborator Lana Del Rey, writing twisty, complicated songs that are stuffed with ten-dollar words, littered with proper nouns. At times, this results in a charming, if confounding, specificity; an unexpected plug for Charlie Puth feels like the kind of random detail that could only have come from a real-life conversation, and it provides the album with a pungent splash of flavor. But the economy of her best work is long gone, replaced with a rambling approach that over-embellishes and over-explains, e.g., “At dinner, you take my ring off my middle finger/ and put it on the one people put wedding rings on.”
Essentially, she spends the whole album in an “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)” state of mind. Every couplet is wrought with literary intention and heightened emotional acuity; every turn of phrase feels like a twist of the knife, meant to elicit an awestruck gasp. Rather than elevating the human drama in these songs, it has the effect of flattening it. When every line seems like it's meant to function as catharsis, none of them actually do. Swift has always written from a place of intense feelings, but here more than ever, it’s fatiguing.
The sheer density of the album lends it the musty aroma of homework, an odor that is intensified by Swift’s increased reliance on “Easter egg” references to her past songs and her extra-musical activities. The album is reportedly inspired by Swift’s extinguished romances with actor Joe Alwyn and The 1975 singer Matty Healy— only one song, the featherweight “The Alchemy,” references her current state of bliss with NFL star Travis Kelce, making it the lone song on the record to exist in an emotionally positive headspace. She never names these paramours directly, but rather scatters the album with bread crumbs, little in-jokes and allusions that can be synced up with her public life to expose the album’s secret meaning.
Such puzzles are nothing new for Swift, who has always provided coded messages to her most fervent fans— but The Tortured Poets Department feels like the subtext has become the text, the side quests the primary narrative. Even before the album’s release, Swifties took to Reddit to parse out the meaning behind the song titles, the artwork, and more. Once the album came out, the little puzzles felt like the raison d'être for the entire project. Swift has crossed over into MCU territory here, not just rewarding but almost requiring studious knowledge of canon and lore: A line referencing antique typewriters means little to casual listeners but provides a fleeting rush of recognition to fans who happen to know that Healy is a typewriter enthusiast. Increasingly, those are the kinds of thrills Swift seems keenest on conjuring.
Even as she invites fans deeper into the mythology of her love life, Swift rejects any imported values, opinions, or critiques. Much of The Tortured Poets Department is concerned with maintaining autonomy while in the public eye, a theme that’s brought to the foreground on the much buzzed-about “But Daddy I Love Him”— perhaps a song about parental disapproval, but more pointedly, a parable about fan disapproval. It is jolting to hear Swift take such an adversarial stance toward her own true believers, many of whom have taken to calling their favorite pop star “Mother” on Instagram and Reddit. Here, Swift casts those same listeners in the unflattering role of the pearl-clutching “Sarahs and Hannahs,” prone to “sanctimoniously performing soliloquies,” to ceaseless “bitching and moaning.” For Swifties who have dreamed of finding themselves as the answer to one of the singer’s promotional crosswords, this acknowledgement of the fandom must surely feel like a wish borne of a monkey’s paw.
That’s not even the album’s most pugilistic moment. In the villainous noir of “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?,” she spits scratching lyrics about how public attention has driven her to misbehavior: “I was tame, I was gentle/ Til the circus life made me mean.” For Swift, who has obviously been adept at establishing intimate rapport with her listeners, such grievance feels tin-eared; I can only think of one public figure who is more prone to imagining himself at the center of a witch hunt.
Tortured Poets’ buried lede is that it’s not merely a continuation of Midnights’ insularity and folk-more’s melancholy— it’s also a full heel turn, a villainous sequel to Reputation’s intoxicating melodrama. Swift isn’t trying to be America’s princess here, but instead leans hard into her most ignoble character traits— resentment, pettiness, obsession, victimhood. Given the breadth of her power and adoration, it is surprising how often she convinces us that she has her back against a wall, and it can be thrilling to hear her kick and punch her way out. She delivers the bridge in “But Daddy I Love Him” with a shocking, dangerous streak of hatefulness: “I’ll tell you something about my good name/ It’s mine alone to disgrace/ I don’t cater to all these vipers dressed in empath’s clothing.” For as carefully as she cultivates public approval, her transformation into Ugly Taylor, a towering witch who just escaped from the asylum, is genuinely riveting.
Elsewhere, this nasty streak makes Swift seem myopic and mean— a bully punching below her weight class. In a song that feels borderline embarrassing, the most famous woman on the planet scolds “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” for betraying her in public. Here, she’s the one who winds up looking small.
I happen to think that Reputation is the most rewarding of Swift’s many eras, and the notion of her taking a heel turn is not in itself disagreeable. The Tortured Poets Department falls short of that previous album’s diabolical grandeur for a couple of reasons.
The first is aesthetic: To play the mustache-twirling villain calls for a certain panache, a willingness to lean into camp and theatricality that was evident throughout Reputation, but is all but absent here. Maligned though they were at the time, songs like “Look What You Made Me Do” and “This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” exhibited a knack for dark comedy that Swift has avoided ever since. Tortured Poets has a few lines that read as funny on paper, but they are delivered without flair; “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)” builds to an actual punchline, but both the production and Swift’s affect are so bland that the joke just deflates. Song titles like “Fresh Out the Slammer” and “Florida!!!” cry out for irony or camp, yet they end up sounding just as blasé as everything else here.
The second major shortcoming of the Tortured Poets era is more spiritual. While Swift is sometimes foolishly dismissed for writing about herself too much, she has always been gifted in memoir and self-mythology, rendering herself a complex and arresting character. In many of her best songs, she plays with public personae as a means of meaningful self-inquiry. On Reputation tracks like “Getaway Car,” she both affirmed her image as an inveterate heart-chaser while also acknowledging its personal toll. Midnights gave us “Anti-Hero,” one of the truly indispensable Taylor Swift songs, offering a serious exploration of being an icon and a role model who is also prone to crippling self-doubt.
For most of Tortured Poets, Swift avoids serious moral and spiritual inquiry in favor of flat archetypes. She is lovelorn, vengeful, and aggrieved. She is overly invested in finding personal satisfaction through fairy-tale romance.
The one significant exception is “I Can Do it With a Broken Heart,” the most winning song on the album by far— and not just because its the one place where the pulse truly quickens. Here, Swift lets her Kabuki mask down to reveal that her performer’s zeal, her insane drive, her inveterate people-pleasing and perfectionism are all manifestations of high-functioning depression, a moving revelation that functions as a kind of skeleton key for the entire Taylor Swift project. To hear the song in light of her previous cheery singles, or the glittery choreography of the Eras tour, is like the scene in Pixar’s Inside Out, as once-bright photographs fade into melancholy grey. And it adds resonance to the album-closing “Clara Bow,” where the unstoppable Taylor Swift foresees the day when she is ultimately replaced in the pop pantheon.
Would that the remainder of Tortured Poets yielded similar insight. While the album does nothing to tarnish Swift’s standing as a generational talent, it does suggest that she has reached an inflection point, both her musical choices and lyrical concerns offering diminishing returns. This may be the start of her flop era— but perhaps also an opportunity for meaningful course-correction.
My rating: 5.5 out of 10
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